Conventional wired or wireless telephones typically employ a sidetone feedback mechanism between the microphone and the headphone/speaker of a user's telephone. This sidetone feedback mechanism allows the user to hear his or her own voice at an attenuated level while speaking into the phone. This gives the user comfort and assurance that the user's speech is being transmitted through a connection to another phone. Simply speaking, the “sidetone” refers to the sound of the user's own voice as heard in the user's telephone receiver at an attenuated level.
Sidetones may be employed in modern digital wireless telephones such as those employing the GSM standard. Digital wireless telephones include a transmit or outbound path having a microphone, microphone preamplifier, gain stage and an analog to digital converter (ADC). The output signal of the ADC is filtered and decimated to produce a pulse code modulated (PCM) signal that is transmitted to another phone. PCM is a commonly used digital representation of an analog signal. Digital wireless telephones also include a receive or inbound path that drives the headphone/speaker of the telephone with audio received from another telephone. The receive path includes a receiver that provides received PCM data to a digital to analog converter (DAC) that converts the received digital audio signal to analog. The output of the DAC is filtered and amplified to provide a received analog audio signal that drives the headphone/speaker. To provide the desired sidetone, an attenuated version of the PCM signal from the transmit path is simply digitally added to the PCM signal in the receive path. In this digital sidetone approach, the audio signal that the user hears in the headphone/speaker includes both the received audio signal and a sidetone of smaller amplitude. This digital sidetone approach employing digital addition works well in many applications. However, latency problems may occur when the digital sidetone signal is delayed in the wireless telephone before being supplied to the earphone. In this case the local sidetone heard by the user may appear to be out of sync, or delayed in time, with respect to the user's speech. This can be very annoying to the wireless telephone user.
What is needed is a wireless communication apparatus and method that provides a sidetone to the user without the problems described above.